page_title: Adolph Wagner
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Adolph Wagner / Biography
caption_attribution_description: Adolph Wagner
context_page_description: Adolph Wagner was a German economist and politician, a leading Kathedersozialist and public finance scholar and advocate of agrarianism. Wagner's law of increasing state activity is named after him.
context_section_description: Born in Erlangen as the son of a university professor, the physiologist Rudolf Wagner, Adolph studied economics at the University of Göttingen, receiving a doctorate in 1857 under supervision of Georg Hanssen. Wagner’s academic career took him first to the Merchants’ Superior School, Vienna (1858–1863), then – after failing to secure a chair at the University of Vienna because of disagreements over fiscal policy with Lorenz von Stein – to the Hamburg Higher Merchants’ School (1863–1865), both institutions comparable to business schools today. In 1865, he took the chair of Ethnography, Geography, and Statistics (in reality an economics professorship) at the University of Dorpat in Livonia which is located in the present day Estonia, but was then part of the Russian Empire.
  In Dorpat (Tartu), Wagner "became a follower of Bismarck’s policy for unifying Germany under Prussian guidance.  Thus when German unification became realistic, Wagner wanted to go back to Germany proper.
  Beginning Fall Term 1868/69, Wagner therefore took over the Chair of the Cameralistic subjects (roughly, state management) at the Badensian University of Freiburg im Breisgau, and very soon afterwards, in 1870, the Chair of Staatswissenschaften at the University of Berlin, by that time not only the premier university in Germany but probably in the world.  It was in Berlin, that Wagner began his tenure as one of the most intellectually and politically influential economists of his time.
  A former student of his, Werner Sombart, was his successor at the economics chair of the University of Berlin.
  Wagner was an early member of the conservative Christian Social Party, founded in 1878 by Adolf Stoecker as the Christlichsoziale Arbeiterpartei (Christian Social Workers' Party).
  Wagner died in Berlin in 1917.
caption: Adolph Wagner by Nicola Perscheid c. 1910
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